So here it is: the end of the road, the final episode of the Battlestar Galactica spin-off series Caprica. The show basically goes out on the same note it held throughout its run: just good enough to keep me watching, never approaching the greatness of its parent series.
The final act of the final episode was the most noteworthy thing about it, but I'll get to that shortly. First, a quick rundown of everything leading up to that.
If you were trying to rationalize a non-death out of William Adama's fate in the prior episode, no such luck. He's dead, and this episode sees Joseph on a quest for vengeance against the mob boss. His rather flighty daughter, after loving Joseph, then getting him in trouble, now decides that the death of a child is too much for her, so she agrees to help set her own father up. Joseph executes the man for his act, and his daughter ends up taking over the mob. The somewhat illogical behavior here overshadows what really should be packing a punch, Joseph having to deal with the loss of another child, after losing his daughter and wife only months before.
The dirty agent in the GDD decides to frame Daniel and Amanda as terrorists (in the wake of Clarice's failed assassination attempt). If you ask me, it's completely murky why, if this is so easily accomplished, he didn't do so earlier. In any case, it puts Daniel and Amanda on the run from the law. Their first stop, the place where Amanda met Jordan on the day he was shot, and they locate Clarice's holoband -- simply misplaced and not stolen, in a rather anticlimactic bit of circumstance. They learn "the plan," to blow up the Pyramid stadium during a C-Bucs game, and rush off to save the day.
In command of a troop of Cylons (from where? don't ask such questions.), Daniel is able to kill all the would-be bombers in the crowd before they detonate their explosives. Meanwhile, as those executed "martyrs" materialize in Clarice's manufactured "heaven," Zoe shows up (how? don't ask such questions.) and uses her increasingly God-like (though decreasingly explained) powers to reform the entire place as a fiery hellscape. Foiled again, Clarice.
Throughout all this, Tamara, Lacy, and Jordan are completely MIA.
Then Caprica shamelessly steals a page from Galactica's playbook, deciding to end its season (and series, as it would turn out) by jumping over a period of time in its final act. The exact amount of time is unspecified, but evidence within the act suggests it's about five years.
That evidence? Joseph now has another young son of about four or five (presumably with Evelyn?), and we see him being christened "Bill," to honor the sacrifice of his lost brother William. So, fooled you, viewer! This is the boy who would grow up to command the Battlestar Galactica.
Other events in this future? Cylons have become fully integrated into society. After saving the day at that Pyramid game, people quickly embraced them. Clarice now preaches monotheism at a church whose congregation is made up entirely of Cylons.
A brand-new flesh and blood (looking) Zoe wakes up in a Cylon-esque "goo bath," her work with her father finally successful in producing a "skin job" body.
Lacy is revealed to be the new "reverend mother"-esque figure running the STO training camp.
Unexplained -- and apparently never to be explained -- who shot Jordan two episodes ago? What happened to Tamara? Would a time jump have helped Caprica find itself to more interesting plots? Was a more direct connection to the events of Battlestar Galactica really what the show needed to be good, or was it just missing the right dramatic charge regardless of the number of Cylons on screen?
Syfy seems to believe that what people want to see is Cylons. To that end, they've already commissioned the next attempt to continue Battlestar Galactica, a prequel movie (with a backdoor option for a new series) that follows Bill Adama during the Cylon war -- titled Blood and Chrome. For my money, what Caprica lacked was the gritty realism, and sympathetic characters trying to cope with it, that Galactica had. No matter how many shoot-'em-up Cylon fights this new movie has, I don't expect I'll like it any more if it doesn't address that more crucial issue.
As for Caprica, I think it'll go down as Crusade did after Babylon 5 -- as a never-fully-baked attempt to extend the original, with a few good elements here and there, but never enough to make it a winner.
2 comments:
I can tell that they would have liked to explain things better, such as the "Neo" powers that Zoe had in "The Matrix" V-World. There probably would have been whole episodes on Daniel getting his cylon army or Joseph dealing with his son's death and plotting revenge.
I would have liked to know who shot Jordan and what happened to Tamara who totally disappeared.
the whole ending felt a lot like skipping through a book and reading bits here and there, and maybe reading the last chapter and then somebody's review of the next book. the whole last montage was pretty much a season 2 through X recap of where they were planning on going.
the one thing I liked about the show was how "believable" Caprica was as a place. They had sports teams and late night talk shows and dirt-eater racism and it really seemed like a "real" place to go. I think I'm going to miss the place more than the stories they were telling there. does that even make any sense? maybe another spin off show isn't such a bad idea after all...
the mole
Yeah, I think that's a good analogy: hearing the story told to you by someone else who read it, and who is leaving out some details.
I also agree with you that the world was more thoroughly developed, and maybe that was a part of my problem. There were certainly advantages to a fleshed-out world, but I personally wish some of the time spent on "world building" had been spent on "character building" or "plot building" instead.
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